Two speakers explore why fasting benefits the body, covering intermittent fasting, autophagy, ketosis, and how hunger regulation works. They explain the physiological changes that happen when you stop eating and why fasting can affect weight management.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. Let me ask you just a practical question first. For people, you know, who hear the word fasting and think, oh, I don't want to do that, what is really and truly the benefit of fasting for a, you know, for different periods the way you described it? Right. You can stop it. You don't have to always do it for this period of time, et cetera, et cetera. What is the actual biological, physiological benefit to your cells if you stop, start, stop, stop, start like that right now.
When you eat all of the time, or you eat most of the time when you're awake? The parts of your body that digest protein are pretty much always working on what's in your stomach. When you stop eating, those systems go to work on breaking down old cells or upgrading old cells to make them young again. And it actually removes inflammatory proteins throughout the body and it improves your body's ability to control your blood sugar. So if you regularly, intermittent fast, I don't mean every day, I mean, three days a week is probably enough for a lot of people. You do that, you're not going to get type 2 diabetes. It's that big of a deal. You're not going to be One of the 42% of Americans who are obese. And if you are obese, without being hungry, this gnawing hunger all the time, without the suffering that every fat person has been through, oh, I lost 20 pounds, I gained 30 pounds, I lost 30 pounds, I gained 40 pounds. I have done this. That won't happen. And what will happen instead is I actually had more energy and less thoughts about food today. That's the real benefit. But it comes because the cells realize, oh, you mean I'm going to have to be able to survive if there's not food all the time, it's time for a house cleaning, it's time for an upgrade. The process is called autophagy. That happens there. There are also changes in your gut bacteria that are really beneficial.
But see, I'm of the generation where we were raised in the time of, you know, girls would go on diet and they would starve themselves and then when they started eating again, they would put on weight. So how do you address that? Is that not true?
Well, it doesn't work that way with fasting at all. And here's why it's not true. When you go on a low calorie, low fat diet the way I did for 18 months, working out six days a week, and I still didn't lose weight when I was in my early 20s, torture, something mean happens. It is torture. And in fact there are studies of torture doing this where it makes people crazy and it makes you ungrounded and it makes you angry and it makes you tired and you can't remember stuff and you get brain fog. But, but you want to look a certain way, you want control over yourself. That happens in part because when you cut calories and use exercise, what I call in the book seco, calories in, calories out. It's a very bad model for dieting. What happens is that you have a hunger set point set by a hormone called ghrelin. And that hunger set point is fixed at your fat weight. And you can lose weight via this old fashioned dieting that we were talking about, eating only lettuce. And let's say that I weighed 300 pounds and I got myself down to 270 pounds. Well now I stopped dieting, but I have the hunger levels of a 300 pound person and inevitably over the next two months I'm still hungry all the time. You're going to eat when you're hungry. Now if you can raise ketones in the body just a little bit, you don't have to go on a keto diet. In fact, the amount of brain octane or MCT oil that people put in their bulletproof coffee is usually enough to get their levels of ketones up to point. Normally if you're on a keto diet, your levels are 2 or 3 on a little finger stick. So if it's at 0.5, your body's set point for hunger will change, your ghrelin sensitivity changes and all of a sudden you have the hunger, in that case of a 270 pounder instead of a 300 pounder. So changing your set point to your current body weight happens with low levels of ketosis.
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